Honour Bayes

This review is from 2012. Check the official ‘Wicked’ website for current casting information. The film world continues its love affair with werewolves, vampires and all things 'Twilight'. But theatre types have always known witches are where it's at. After its 2006 opening at Apollo Victoria, Oz prequel 'Wicked' continues to fill this massive theatre with an international crowd of voracious consumers (glass of champagne and a choccy for £16 anyone?). But this stylish and bombastic musical still delivers, sailing over its patchy score thanks to a gravity-defying performance from its current leading lady Rachel Tucker, as the intense green-skinned undergrad who goes on to become the Wicked Witch of the West. 'Wicked' is a spectacle that rises or falls around its central performance. In the midst of a gigantic production full of bangs, bells and whistles Tucker, with her small frame and searing vocal ability, simply flies off with the show. She's closely followed by Gina Beck, who plays good girl, Glinda. Glinda and Elphaba's relationship forms the heart of this story and, as the Good Witch, Beck is a consummate clown, playing up the silliness of her character at every turn. But she can raise a tear, too, and her final duet with Tucker, 'For Good', is genuinely heart-rending. The Tim Burton-inspired ensemble oscillate between the hypnotic and grotesque and a sweet but thin voiced Matt Willis charms as the rather superfluous Prince. As in classical ballet, this is all about the

'No Villain' will transfer to Trafalgar Studios in Summer 2016. This review is from December 2015, when the play showed at The Old Red Lion.  This premiere of Arthur Miller’s debut play, staged for the first time nearly 80 years after it was written, will surely intrigue a generation brought up on showbiz pages and Instagram backstage snaps. The story of a Jewish manufacturing family torn apart by the Great Depression is a fascinating insight into the mind of one of the 20th century’s most talked about artists, if not men; he married Marilyn Monroe after all. ‘No Villain’ foreshadows all Miller’s biggest themes: the uncomfortable role of women in a patriarchal world; the ruinous effects of money, or the lack of it; and the tricky relationships between fathers and sons. There’s a neat symmetry to the work that went into the writing of the play itself and its debut production. Turner spent a dogged 18 months researching the production; Miller was determined to win the $250 Avery Hopwood Award to fund his writing ambitions. ‘No Villain’ won Miller the money and this visceral production has made a winner of Turner as well. The cast give it their all. At points they give too much and the whole thing feels overly loaded with effort. Just as Miller attempts to show off with fancy footwork (rather superfluously flipping a telephone scene so it’s seen from both perspectives), so the cast are desperate to impress. The play’s attempts to crowbar Communist ideology into the plot through

Meera Syal’s autobiographical novel ‘Anita and Me’ is famous for showing what it was like being the only Punjabi teenager in a 1970s Midlands village. But it’s also a universal coming-of-age story about the awkward experience of growing up. Tankia Gupta and Roxana Silbert’s stage production captures Syal’s at times caustic, at others warm humour with a clunky, eager to please energy that strongly echoes the teenagers it portrays.It sort of works. By focusing on the eponymous friendship at the centre of Syal’s story – Meena meets Anita, they become BFFs until Meena realises Anita’s ‘not all that’ and begins to find herself – Gupta highlights the universality of this search for identity. In doing so she simplifies the story and strengthens it. The idea that you might feel as separated from the world by neglectful parents as you might by loving migrant ones is one that still needs to be made. But it comes at the expense of Syal’s subtle explorations into the sort of casual racism on the rise again, or the acceptance she describes receiving where least expected.As if imagined by these Brummie teenagers everything in Silbert’s production feels huge and is hugely portrayed. The performances seem to intentionally teeter on stereotype, with the exception of Ayesha Dharker’s delicately detailed performance as Meena’s mother. There’s not much room for shading, which is frustrating when issues like sexual and domestic abuse are touched upon. But there’s enough charm in these broad perfo

It’s always tough when you realise your heroes have feet of clay. Do you remember the time Niall from One Direction got caught on camera with a cigarette and a million tweenies cried? But we sort of love it too. We’ve even got a term for it: tall poppy syndrome. But why do we do it? Sarah Page’s clunky, if well-meaning, new play tries to find out.Girl group (and heroines to an army of teenage girls) The Sweethearts have been flown out to do a gig for heroes of a different kind at a base in Afghanistan. An insurgent attack raises uncomfortable questions of society’s misplaced idolism.And I mean really uncomfortable. There’s a moment involving a young woman being stripped and written on that is utterly unearned. ‘The Sweethearts’ reads like a polished sitcom, it’s not a gritty realistic drama, and this ending is pure melodrama.The beginning is great, full of energy underscored with well-observed jabs at B-list celebrity and army barrack culture. Daniel Burgess’s cast are in their element playing up to their character’s ‘traits’. Joe Claflin’s Private David Robins is ‘the poetic one’, while Jack Derges’s ‘walking erection’ Lance Corporal Mark Savy is the beefy leader of the pack.As for the girls Sophie Stevens’s ‘I am the band’ Coco, Doireann May White’s ‘sweet but stupid’ Mari and Maria Yarjah’s ‘sexy second-string singer’ Helena perform their established roles to the hilt. Laura Hanna brings more emotional shading to Corporal Rachel Taylor and feels more complex than the rest.